March 29, 2023

5-6 pm UTC

We’re excited to let you know about the forthcoming Funk Lecture!

Join us on Wednesday, March 29 at 5 pm UTC, for a talk by Dr. Pablo A. Marquet.

PABLO A. MARQUET is Full Professor in the Department of Ecology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Associate Scientists at the Center for Mathematical Modeling and Simons Associate at the International Center for Theoretical Physics (Trieste, Italy). Originally trained as an ecologist, his career has been marked by transdisciplinary collaborations with physicists, mathematicians, and social scientists, to tackle questions in different systems, from ecological to social ones. He has devoted most of his research to the search for the general principles that underlie the structure and dynamics of ecological systems using different theoretical approaches and models.   He has worked on the relationship between the size of organisms and their abundance in local communities, the evolution of body size on landmasses, connecting body size to area, evolution, and fitness. He pioneered the development of Metapopulation models in dynamic landscapes uniting concepts from epidemiology and ecology and the emergence of power laws in ecological systems, being among the first to provide empirical evidence of Self-Organized Criticality in ecological systems using the extinction record of birds in Hawaii. During the last years he has turned his interest to the distribution of abundance and richness, the analysis of fluctuations in the fossil record, the role of temperature in affecting biological dynamics, the integration of theories in ecology, and the emergence of diversity, social complexity and innovations in simple biological systems and human groups. He is member of the Chilean Academy of Sciences, International member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS, USA), The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AmAcad) and the The World Academy of Science (TWAS). He is the author of more than 250 scientific publications.